Field research in a social rehabilitation facility. Possibilities and limitations. The nature of peer violence in schools: a psycho-evolutionary perspective and its pedagogical implications

Abstract

The Nature of School Bullying: A Psycho-Evolutionary Perspective and Its Pedagogical Implications

The position of evolutionary psychology assumes the existence of certain psychological mechanisms that have been shaped over the lifetime of thousands of generations in response to specific adaptation problems. Moreover, it emphasizes the interactive nature of human actions, which allows to draw attention to the fact that the appropriate constellation of the perpetrator’s, victim’s, social context and the adaptation problem may lead to aggressive actions treated as a strategic solution. Through the prism of this perspective, one can look at the problem of peer bullying in the school environment, and this is what has been done in this article. According to the adopted optics, bullying is understood as a phenomenon that results from goal-oriented, strategic aggressive behaviors that harm others in the context of power imbalance and that serve as a potential way of acquiring social resources.

Keywords

aggressive behavior; bullying; evolutionary approach; evolutionary psychology; bully